An African-American lawmaker in South Carolina said Tuesday that stricter illegal immigration laws would hurt the state because blacks and whites don’t work as hard as Hispanics.

State Sen. Robert Ford made his remarks during a Senate committee debate over an Arizona-style immigration law, eliciting a smattering of nervous laughter in the chamber after he said “brothers” don’t work as hard as Mexicans. He continued that his “blue-eyed brothers” don’t either.

Once his ancestors were freed from slavery, he said, they didn’t want to do any more hard work, so they were replaced by Chinese and Japanese.

“We need these workers here. A lot of people aren’t going to do certain type of work in this country,” said Ford, D-Charleston. “The brothers are going to find ways to take a break. Ever since this country was built, we’ve had somebody do the work for us.”

Of course, we do have a work-ethic problem in our country, especially among the young. But “Hispanics” aren’t immune — it’s only newly arrived peasants from the third world, used to working like dogs for pennies, that the open-borders crowd loves so much. Their kids are Americans, raised in the same modern environment and marinated in the same swill of popular culture as the rest of us, and no more hard-working than anyone else. Mass immigration is like a drug, enabling us to ignore this problem (at least for those small parts of the body politic that profit from immigration), while damaging our nation’s overall health. Just say no to drugs.